Okay, well not quite ON Letterman, but more accurately at Letterman... or better yet, brainwashed by Letterman.
Before I get into it, I do want to say that of the three late night options -- you don't count Jimmy Kimmel, Fallon or Craig Ferguson -- Letterman is by far the best right now.
Now my love for Conan O'Brien goes way, way back. I think I had all of Triumph the Insult Comic Dog's Westminster Dog Show skits taped -- remember when we used to videotape shows? -- and I would take them around high school with me in my backpack, and play them for friends and friends of friends any chance I got, so much so that I started getting weird looks about my insane laughter when Triumph force fed a foot-long weinerschnitzel down a purse dog's throat, for instance. Like a puppet shoving it's nose into a dog's ass is that odd or something. And Pimpbot and the Masturbating Bear were staples of my adolescence and for that, I feel forever loyal to Conan.
But watching him now is... uncomfortable? He has watered down a lot of his act, like he's no longer allowed to be as bizarre and off-colour as he was, with Leno's old spot. And his interviews are unbearable. He doesn't let the guest get a word in edgewise. Or a laugh. Conan asks a question that comes from out of the blue with no lead-in, the celebrity answers the pre-scripted query with an even more scripted anecdote, and then Conan steals the punchline with his own self-deprecation. And the guest squirms. Conan is just trying to hard, and it really shows.
I guess his show now is kind of like when the Sopranos is shown on A&E. Sure, it's the Sopranos, but with no cussing, violence or gratuitous titty shots at the Bing, is it really the same thing?
And I won't even dignify Jay Leno with a paragraph (okay, I will). I don't think he's ever been funny, has he? He's too comfortable with his success and whenever he has a guest on, it comes off like these people are part of this exclusive celebrity club, and on a plain above us all. He is one big cross-promotion -- does anyone remember when he briefly became a professional wrestler? He's fluff.
Maybe Leno's on steroids. That would explain his giant cranium, which is about the only thing I laugh at when I tune in.
Letterman still has an edge. He's cantankerous, a prankster, like he's still a rebellious teenager, always poking fun at the show, himself, the network and the medium. He still has spunk -- and it's not reserved exclusively for the interns he carouses with. (You knew I had to touch that... that's what she said.)
He is still relevant and funny and gives the best interview of the three.
AAAAAANNNYYWAYS, I was in New York last month -- shit, two months ago... -- and dropped in for a taping of the Late Show. It was an ordeal to get the tickets, involving cross-country phone calls and skill-testing questions. But in any case, the tickets were free and that's all I needed.
And the show was good. The monologue brought the funny, the interviews were filled with laughs and so were the skits. However, the experience left me feeling a little less naive about what I see on TV and if the tickets weren't free, I would have felt a little used.
I showed up a couple hours early, and went over to Rupert G's deli. There he was: Rupert, the Roberto Alomar-looking comedic prop Letterman has used for years. I ordered a cheeseburger (got to love Americans. They always ask you how you want your cheeseburger. "Cooked," I always respond.) and spoke to him for a bit, asking about the energy drink in his fridge, displaying his likeness with an Arnold-esque physique.
"Let yourself go, I guess," I said.
Buzzing a bit off the D-list encounter -- and the amazing cheeseburger -- I stood in line and waited to get into the show.
And that's when things got a little weird.
Every few minutes, a staff member would come by and pump us up.
"ARE YOU READY TO SEE DAVE?"
"Yeah," we'd say, and clap a bit.
"AWW COME ON! I CAN'T HEEEARRR YOU!!!"
So we'd clap louder and yell louder. This continued for an hour or so until we were herded inside for the taping. A couple hundred people are jammed into the lobby of the Ed Sullivan Theatre, and we're all sweating up a storm.
Then an intern stands up on a counter and tells us we're about to get inside, but the whole time, she's hyping us up more and more and more. She says the Late Show doesn't use a laugh track and we are the soundtrack of the show and that we have to provide the energy to bring the best out of Dave and then says that if we don't laugh hard at a joke in the monologue, Dave may not use it and try it out on the next -- or better -- audience (of course, she says way friendlier). We now feel duty-bound to laugh, and anything remotely funny that comes from her mouth from then on is met with a surprising amount of laughter.
She gives us the 'what-to-do, what-not-to-do' speech and tells us it's forbidden to take pictures. She tells a couple really corny jokes and people are outdoing each other in the laugh department.
I'm getting sucked in.
"ARE YOU READY TO SEE DAVE?"
"YEAHHHH!" we clap and yell and scream.
"I CAN'T HEAR YOU!"
"YEAHHHHHHHHH!!!"
I find myself trying to be louder than the person next to me.
They open the doors and we shuffle into the theatre, with ushers placing certain people on the aisle -- "the pretty ones," the couple from Washington State, sitting next to me, say. Music is blaring and all the staff are clapping hands to the beat and encouraging us to do the same.
The theatre is tiny. You'd think it was this vast expanse, judging from what you see on TV, but it's not at all. The impression of space is all camera tricks. The monologue area is sandwiched between the desk/interview area and the band. The entire set is probably 50ft long -- Dave's desk maybe 25 ft from the band. It's amazing how much they get out of such a small area, using a stage door and steps in their skits, and hiding "Big Red" announcer Alan Kalter at the side of the stage. The set was my first clue that this would be a completely surreal experience -- I was lucky I could still think at all, following the brainwashing.
Then the band comes out and plays a couple songs, and they're really good and I'm surprised and wondering when the show will start and we're still clapping and Paul Schaeffer comes out and they keep playing and then they show a clip of Dave, taking over the window at a drive-thru, which is really funny and we keep laughing and LAUGHING and LAAAUUUGHHINNNG and it's getting weird and loud and my hands are sweating a little and my breathing is getting thin and I'm getting kind of claustrophobic.
The warm-up comedian -- who looked like Larry David's friend from Curb -- comes on and he is really bad but we're still laughing. The band starts up again and we're clapping again and then... DAVE!!!
This 62-year-old man, who's had major heart surgery, and you would think is frail and lifeless BOUNDS out from behind the stage and crosses the whole monologue area in three LEAPS, like he's on springs or something. He looked like a freekin' Bugs Bunny character the way he shot across the stage.
The music dies down and he asks us how we're doing and we laugh -- I think. The guy is a fucking pro, man. He is so comfortable on stage. He cracks a couple jokes and takes a few questions from the audience, which he rips a couple goofy riffs on and then, feeling happy with where we are at, turns around and it's time to start.
The band starts up again and Kalter reads off the guests names and out comes Dave again, acting like he's in front of an intimate audience up there, but having only spoken to us for a minute or two. The audience -- myself included, once again -- is going ballistic. So much so that I expect the first three or four jokes in Dave's monologue are unusable. The crowd, after being conditioned to react and laugh at everything through every rhetoric device in the book, is now doing just that and we are going into hysterics during the set-up of jokes.
Example:
"How about that Bernie Madoff. Evil guy, right?"
(applause and laughter)
"Bernie Madoff's $7.5 million estate is up for sale."
(smattering of laughs)
"It will be going up on Century 21."
(house comes down with laughter)
Letterman, slightly perturbed "and Century 22 by the time Madoff gets out."
(confused laughter)
Never have I been more aware of how malleable I, and my human counterparts, are.
The jokes were all pretty good though, but it was just odd to be there, hearing Letterman tell one after another. He must have told 20. He only goofed on one, and while the graphic or video accompanying the joke went up, he turned and swore or something, getting a reaction out of the band. We keep laughing.
The whole thing is so immediate and bang-bang. Tiny little breaks between spots, where the lights go down and Letterman gets up to talk to some producers or something with the audience still clapping away, literally, in the dark. There are no second-takes. It's all done quickly, and all on the fly.
I can now understand why guest always look so nervous up there and why there are so many awkward silences. If you believe in auras and all that stuff, you would probably pass out from all the nervous energy given off by the crowd in there, and I'm sure that vibe affects the guests. When you watch the show on TV, the laughter usually seems natural and takes on the role of a character in the show. At the taping, I just felt weirded out, like there was no magic to any of this and that what looked like such an intimate environment, was really a laugh factory. Like this was all some sort of mechanized humour set-up, with Letterman as the military-industrial comic.
He never once repeated anything, did anything over. I was just so impressed by the efficiency and quality of the production.
The audience often jumped the gun with applause or preempted a punchline with laughter. It happened when Matt Damon went on about his George Clooney story.
Damon was hilarious though -- almost so much so that I wondered if the show's writers wrote up his anecdotes. He goes off, waves goodbye. Then it's Jack Hanna, the animal guy, who brings out snow leopards and we watch as a pelican bites Letterman's hand and we laugh and I felt it weird that we laughed.
Anyways, the whole thing is over in like 40 minutes. The band played a lot.
Dave says bye and then we are ushered out, like the morning after.
Like I said, it was free and funny, but I no longer believe anything I see on TV. That shit's just weird. And I completely understand mob mentality. I'm sure if those people told us to light buildings on fire, we would have done it.
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